6/1 Massada & The Dead Sea

pictures for today here. all of them here.

We woke up early today to catch our bus out of Herzliya for a tour of (today) the Dead Sea and Messada and (tomorrow) Jerusalem. We'll be staying overnight in Jerusalem as well - it'll be nice to see that city a bit more.

There ended up being a bit of miscommunication as we were told to be ready at 715 and they were actually expecting us at 7. Obviously it could have been much worse as the 15 minutes just meant we were really rushed and a bit late instead of completely missing things - still, not a great start though. After picking up a few others we were off to Jerusalem.

Jerusalem is a gorgeous city, built in the mountains (big hills anyway). The mountain is not very high but high enough that all of the available precipitation falls on it -- there's a ridge in town where you can look down at one side of town and see green and green in the area beyond, but if you look the other way you see the Arabian Desert.

On our way out of town (we weren't there long - just to pick people up) we saw some goat herders / nomads on the way out of town. These people, live life in as traditional a way as possible. They try to avoid almost everything modern but apparently have become much less nomadic lately as they now have water pipes coming to their settlements. They are in the dessert so I'm sure that at some point you might just have to accept something modern to improve your life by that much.

Shortly before we reached the Dead Sea we saw a city a bit in the distance: Jericho. We weren't headed in that direction (it's Palestinian at the moment) but it's incredible to see cities that you've heard so much about and have so much history. We also passed by the caves where the Dead Sea Scrolls were found - another place that we weren't stopping at but again...wow.



The Dead Sea is a picturesque Desert Oasis. Although, maybe "oasis" isn't the right word when the water is incredibly undrinkable. Amazingly, the Dead Sea is 33% salt which makes floating in it incredibly easy (more on that later).

Our first stop wasn't actually at the Dead Sea - it was Massada. Read this for a bit of a refresher: click here (it's quite the story, you really should check it out).


Some original flooring:


Looking down the giant ramp the Romans built (if you don't know what I'm talking about - read that last link):


After Messada we were off to make a proper stop at the Dead Sea. The stop was something that I'm really glad we did - here are the three things to tell you about the trip:
1. I put the Dead Sea "black mud" on my skin which is just sitting on the bottom there... it was... something I needed to do. I can't say that I kept it on any longer than a minute though - I just wanted to have done it.

2. I floated in the Dead Sea - another "must do". It basically feels like you have a life preserver on - only it's covering your whole body. Almost like you're sitting in a recliner in the water - you go in a "seated" position and your chest stick out of the water along with your knees and feet. Pretty crazy!

3. It's easy to scrape yourself up at the Dead Sea + scraping yourself and adding salt water is not fun. While basically "crawling around" on top of the mud (if you try to walk you sink) I got some scrapes, but I guess that's the price of admission.

4. (wait, did I say there'd be only 3?) -- It's friggin hot in the Arabian Dessert. We were actually there on a "cold" day and it was easily 100F. Apparently it gets up as high as 130F... you may want to bring some sunscreen.


We were pleasantly surprised when we got to Jerusalem to find that we actually had a nice hotel - we weren't expecting much for the place "included with the 2 day tour". It was located in a pretty cool neighborhood to the West of the Old City. Not sure of the neighborhood name but Hillel Street was the area where we found dinner and a coffee shop. The action seems to pick up later here in general with people getting dinner in the 7-8 time slot on average so we were a bit early for the real action. I was ok with an earlier night though as we had had quite a bit of sun and walking and were in for more of the same tomorrow.